James Baquet

    My guess is that most little boys like to make things fly, as well as to blow things up. Robert Goddard (1882-1945), then, should be their hero.

    His father encouraged his interests in science and engineering, even though his experiments sometimes filled the house with smoke. He gave him a telescope, a microscope, and a subscription to the magazine Scientific American. One day when he was just 17, he wrote in his diary:

    “On this day I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn … and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars... I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended. Existence at last seemed very purposive.”

    For the rest of his life he celebrated that day, Oct. 19, as a private anniversary.

    Due to poor health, Goddard finished high school around age 22, and immediately enrolled in college, where he became a tutor and lab assistant. He took a bachelor of science degree at 26, and after a year of teaching entered graduate school, taking his Ph.D in 1911, and a year later becoming a research fellow at Princeton University.

    He worked with gyroscopes and radio waves, but is best remembered for his pioneering work in rocketry. In 1913 he left Princeton due to further illness — he had contracted tuberculosis — but during his convalescence he continued to work at home, and took his first patents, related to rockets.

    Feeling better, he returned to work, this time at his alma mater, Clark University. When his research became too expensive, he applied for grants, receiving funds from, among others, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society.

    The military sought his help, and he published numerous articles. In one of these, he speculated on reaching the moon, and was widely ridiculed. The New York Times mocked the very idea of space flight — and published a retraction 49 years later, the day after America reached the moon in 1969.

    So important was his work that in 1959, NASA named one of its major laboratories after him.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. having meaning

    2. legal protections for one’s inventions

    3. went up

    4. school one has graduated from

    5. made fun of (two words)

    6. a disease of the lungs

    7. devices used for maintaining balance in flight

    8. time of healing

    9. took back, withdrew

    10. came down